Friday, April 30, 2010

Well readers, Breakfast Week has come to a close. We have showed you four delicious breakfast meals. What are you missing? One not-so-delicious breakfast meal! Obviously, we are not going to share the recipe for this one because we were very unimpressed. They weren't awful, just not great - a little dry, a little small, definitely not CFC blog material. But they look so beautiful in pictures! So, in the spirit of Blooper Friday, here's our Breakfast Week blooper.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Breakfast Week continues!! We love buttermilk pancakes. Blueberries, chocolate chips, strawberries, and warm maple syrup can only make them better. But do you know what makes them the best? Shaping them like farm animals!!! When we were at our local Williams-Sonoma we saw these and knew we had to have them. Luckily, the pig's mom saw our faces too and bought them for us. We were going to use a recipe that we had found online, but there was a recipe right on the package of the molds that was almost identical, so we followed that instead. This recipe is also a tutorial on using these fantastic molds.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Welcome back! Today is the third day of Breakfast Week at the Castle Farm Cookbook. Today we are making the most complicated recipe of the week, Brown Sugar Raisin Bread! This one definitely takes some time, but a lot of the time is just sitting around while the yeast does the real work. Don't let the yeast and number of ingredients scare you away - we promise it's not that bad! Plus, when you are done you will have 2 loaves of homemade raisin bread. We found this recipe at Williams-Sonoma's website.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Welcome back to our second day of breakfast week! Today we are doing another great breakfast meal that you can make on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy all week. Plus, everyone loves banana bread - especially monkeys! That's why we've asked our friend Grover the monkey to help us out today.

There's a lot of recipes out there, but this is Grover's favorite because he has made it many times and it always comes out perfectly. He found it in The Everything Cookbook. The recipe makes two loaves, so if you don't want that much bread, you can always freeze one for another week of breakfast. It also halves pretty well, so if you just have a banana sitting on your counter that is too old to eat, make some banana bread!

Monday, April 26, 2010

It's Breakfast Week at the Castle Farm Cookbook! Each day this week, we'll be posting a great breakfast recipe. This first one is so easy and versatile, we think of it as more of an idea than a recipe; it's our famous breakfast sandwiches. We were eating at Starbucks one morning and we ordered a turkey bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich - all they had to do to make it for us was pop it in the oven - it was already pre-assembled. So, we figured we can do that too!

Friday, April 23, 2010

Let me start off by saying that this was delicious - it only looks like a pile of goop. The problem definitely was not with the recipe or the food itself. It came from our wonderful Spanish cookbook that we love and the problem was certainly user error and lack of Spanish cooking skills.

We saw our Spanish friend who gave us the cookbook recently and asked her about how we managed to mess this up so badly. She gave us some good tips that hopefully will lead to a tortilla that looks like a tortilla next time. We definitely hope to share this recipe with you in the future as a success story. For now, we give you another edition of Blooper Friday! aka your chance to laugh at us. But it's ok, we have a good sense of humor about our failures!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

While we are big fans of alcohol in cooking, we think amaretto is an underused ingredient. There are always recipes with wine and beer and even rum - but amaretto? Not often. We have a delicious recipe for an Amaretto Cake, but amaretto in a cream sauce is a whole new type of deliciousness. Variations of this recipe are all over the web.

Monday, April 12, 2010

This is one of our all-time favorite easy recipes to whip up for weekday lunches. We bought a pre-made package of a similar couscous at Wegmans one time and thought it was good - but needed work. So a few attempts later, we made up our own recipe. This is a Castle Farm original!

Friday, April 9, 2010

We've decided to start a new tradition we call Blooper Friday! Sometimes we make a recipe, (like this one), and it looks beautiful, but something goes wrong and it tastes terrible... Other times, it tastes great but doesn't look very pretty. We don't think we should post a recipe that didn't work out, but we also think keeping these pictures to ourselves would be a waste!

We've got some bloopers set up for the next few weeks, but hopefully we won't have so many that this will be an EVERY Friday tradition...

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Since we were making an Indonesian Beef Stew, we decided we would stick with the Southeast Asian theme and make a complimentary dessert. We found this recipe for a sorbet at Williams-Sonoma's website and it is perfect because mangoes and pineapples are pretty much the only fruits in season right now! Plus, we always like an excuse to use our ice cream maker. We also like excuses to eat delicious things. So really this all worked out very well for us.

You will find these instructions are not very specific because they depend a lot on your model of ice cream maker. We have the Kitchenaid mixer attachment, so if you have any questions for this, leave us a comment.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

It seems like we make a lot of beef stew. There's this beer and beef stew, this french beef stew, and now Indonesian Beef Stew. There are two reasons for this: they are all very different and we really like beef stew. Even Cal understands how it is.